Best Friends, Really
by Sarah1281
Summary: Abbie tries to wrap her head around the true identity of the Headless Horseman. Just what she needed: one more half-solved riddle to contend with while trying to somehow avert the apocalypse.


Best Friends, Really

Abbie was quite pointedly not looking at Ichabod and not asking him any questions. Given that she had just found out that the Headless Horseman, who was doubling as one of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, was kind of a friend of his she considered this a great feat of willpower.

No, instead of asking him anything she was on the computer doing research. One never knew when archaic knowledge of things from two or three hundred years ago would come in handy, after all, and she couldn't expect Ichabod to know everything that happened back then. She might possibly have been Googling Abraham Van Brunt but her partner didn't need to know that. She was not pressuring him about that. He would come to her when he was ready.

Or maybe he would tell her more about his wife that he apparently knew literally nothing about and who was sort of not dead. She didn't begrudge him his feelings but she was never quite sure what to say about the fact Katrina lied to him about everything but her name and that she might not be as lost to him as everyone else was. Dear Abbie was not going to be any help with this. Maybe Maury.

Ichabod kept saying that they needed to save Katrina and it looked like that was true, even aside from him wanting to rescue his wife. The only question was how they would go about doing it and neither of them had any ideas. What would saving her even mean? Would she be sucked back into her own timeline? Move on to the afterlife? Would she come to Sleepy Hollow with them? She tried to imagine shepherding _two_ people who were out of their time around and keeping them out of any non-Apocalypse-related trouble and shuddered. At least Captain Irving was finally in the know. And maybe Jenny could pitch in. Would sort-of time travelers be sufficiently Apocalypse-related enough to get her interested?

Ichabod cleared his throat awkwardly. "Leftenant, I would understand if there are a few things you would like to ask me in light of our newest…discovery about our foe."

That was certainly one way of putting it.

"I wouldn't want to pry," Abbie demurred. "I can't imagine what that must be like."

Ichabod grimaced. "It is…not pleasant. But you deserve to know anything that I can tell you and now it seems that my past is threatening all of us more so than I had originally thought."

Well now that he had invited her to ask that was a different matter. "I just…" She trailed off, shaking her head. "You and the Horseman? Friends? Really?"

"He was not always quite so headless," Ichabod said dryly. "And for the majority of our acquaintance he had not been in the service of Moloch."

"Maybe," Abbie said. "I would have sworn that Andy Brooks hadn't even _heard_ of Moloch until I called him about the Horseman – about Abraham-"

"Please, Leftenant," Ichabod interrupted. "Call him the Horseman. Abraham was my friend and this twisted abomination that Moloch has turned him into isn't him. Not really."

It was only what he had become but Abbie understood. She had had difficulty facing just what Moloch had done to her bright and friendly friend as well. Brooks had made his own choices the same as Abraham had but dealing with the consequences wasn't easy for those who hadn't made such stupid mistakes.

"Right," Abbie said nodding. "Until I called Brooks and told him about the Horseman and he tried to kill me, I wouldn't have thought he'd have been involved at all. But now he's risen from the grave and kind of trying to help us stop the Apocalypse he's working for. He's a little confused."

Perhaps it wasn't fair to say he had tried to kill her. He had certainly attacked her and tried to stop her from stopping the Horseman (as if she even could have!) but he could have killed her and he had taken pains not to. It didn't make him a hero or excuse what he had done but it was something, at least. Something told her that Brooks had enough to answer for and didn't need his crimes exaggerated.

"You're saying that it's possible that he was working in the service of Moloch while alive and afterwards Moloch did not release him from his contract and becoming the Horseman was a natural extension of that?" Ichabod asked thoughtfully. He stroked his beard. "I do not believe so. Abraham was a proud man and hated to be indebted to anybody. It would have taken nothing short of the deepest betrayal for him to have acted thus."

Abbie didn't say anything but something must have shown on her face for Ichabod continued with, "What? You disagree?"

"I just don't know that that's the _deepest _betrayal," Abbie explained. "I mean, yeah, it must suck for his best friend and his fiancé to decide to get married and just spring the news on him like that but it's not like he found you two in bed together before she had broken it off."

"In bed?" Ichabod repeated, a little puzzled. "I do not quite get your meaning nor, I suspect, would I care to. Neither of us had intended to hurt Abraham though perhaps it was inevitable. If the situation was any worse then I have no doubt that I would be dead by now. Moloch does not want me killed, for some reason, but the Horseman was willing to violate that prohibition today. In the past, before I knew of him, I would have been quite easy to kill and with a worse betrayal he would not have been able to resist going after me."

"It is curious that you're not supposed to be killed," Abbie said, frowning and allowing herself to be sidetracked.

Ichabod nodded. "I've had that same thought myself. I am one of two witnesses destined to stop the Apocalypse. Moloch wishes for his Apocalypse to succeed. Why wouldn't he want one of the two people who are supposed to prevent this to die? Wouldn't that mean that he'd win right then? Is he just trying to make it a _challenge _or something?"

Abbie shrugged. "I have no idea how odd Pan's Labyrinth-esque demonic entities think, Crane. But maybe it wouldn't be so simple."

Ichabod raised an eyebrow at her. "Do you feel up to preventing the End of Days by yourself?"

"We're hardly by ourselves," Abbie pointed out. "We've got my sister and Irving, for sure, and then Henry Parrish might help out. Even Brooks could come through again though he's just as likely to screw us over."

"Yes," Ichabod agreed, "we do seem to be collecting a small army of sorts though hopefully if we continue to do so they'll be a bit more reliable than your former colleague."

"At least he's not reliable to the bad guys, either," Abbie said. "But what I was thinking was, does losing a witness have to be permanent? It hardly seems fair that Moloch can lose all sorts of people and still get to end the world but we two humans must stay alive in order to stop him."

"He's evil; I don't think 'fairness' comes into it at all," Ichabod said. "And we don't know whether or not losing one of the Horsemen would derail the planned Apocalypse either. Though you are right that we are slightly easier to kill than at least the one Horseman we've met."

"I'm just thinking, you and I aren't the only ones to witness something. I mean, if nothing else Jenny was right there alongside me seeing the same things I saw. Maybe she even knows more about what happened those four missing days than I do; we never really talked about it. If you – or me, for that matter – were to die then I think she could take our place just fine," Abbie explained.

"I don't know that witnesses are replaceable," Ichabod said uncertainly. "But then again, I don't know that they're _not_."

"We had better hope that they are," Abbie said bluntly. "If nothing happens to the two of us then it really doesn't matter but if it _does _then we don't want to take the whole world with us."

"We would hardly be the ones destroying the world but I do take your meaning. How does that connect with Moloch potentially not wanting me dead?"

"Well, whoever the new witness might be would be a bit of a wildcard. It could be Jenny or Irving or someone we've never even met and Moloch hasn't heard of," Abbie said reasonably. "You they know quite a bit about and have Katrina. I think that they'd feel more confident that they could stop or manipulate you then they would some stranger."

Ichabod frowned. "I don't like the sound of that."

"I don't either but you have to know that the odds of them not trying to use her against you is pretty low and at least you have a track record of beating Moloch and his minions," Abbie said, taking a moment to appreciate how poetic that last bit sounded.

"Knowing is not the same as liking," Ichabod murmured darkly. "I feel like this is my fault, that she's in danger because of me."

"And the Horseman said it was his fault because she is to be his reward. Besides, you didn't know any of this and certainly didn't agree to being a witness so you really can't blame yourself."

"Abraham wouldn't have become the Horseman without me and Katrina could have continued her life unmolested," Ichabod said.

Abbie did a double-take. "Molested? When did Katrina get molested?"

Ichabod gave her a strange look. "She was torn from our world somehow and put into purgatory. How is that unmolested?"

Abbie relaxed. "Oh, I thought you meant-"

"What?"

Abbie shook her head. "Never mind. Just that word carries some pretty different connotations today so I'd be careful about throwing it around."

"I will keep that in mind," Ichabod said.

"I just really can't believe that you were friends."

"I'm having difficulty accepting that my friend has become this monster as well," Ichabod told her.

"It's not that so much, though yeah it is kind of hard to imagine him as human once," Abbie replied.

"What is it then?"

"Maybe it's not fair because I only know about the end of it but you guys just seem like you were a little bad at the whole friendship thing," Abbie said delicately.

Ichabod furrowed his brow but he seemed unoffended. "How so?"

"To begin with, you fell in love with his fiancé," Abbie said bluntly.

Ichabod looked pained. "They were not a love match and I assure you that it was not intentional! One simply cannot help with whom one falls in love. The only thing that you can control is how you react to this and I assure you that I never had any intention of acting on my feelings."

Abbie didn't feel like she even needed to say anything there.

Ichabod flushed. "I did love Katrina and she loved me. I did make an attempt to dissuade her from her course and told her that I would not be a party to hurting my friend that way."

"And yet…"

"She informed me that I was being too sure of my own importance and that she had decided that she could not live a life where she would marry without love and, with or without me, the wedding was not going to be taking place," Ichabod replied. "When I knew that, well, I did not see why everyone had to be miserable. We did wait a respectable time and would not have announced our engagement the day after Katrina broke hers with Abraham."

"That's nice of you but you were still his best friend getting married to the girl he was supposed to marry," Abbie pointed out. "Katrina might have left him even without you but the fact is that she left him and then had you so it really did look like she left you for him. That's just not very good friendship right there. And didn't you say that he died the very next day?"

Ichabod nodded reluctantly. "Yes."

"So that means that you told him, literally less than twenty-four hours after he had learned that his fiancé was leaving him, that you were planning on marrying her. And you asked for his blessing."

"When you put it that way it sounds a little worse than it was," Ichabod protested. "He told me about Katrina breaking their engagement. He was upset and…I hadn't intended to tell him but I didn't feel right lying to him either. He wanted to tell me about his woes and I was his best friend. How could I refuse to hear him, especially when his pain was in some ways my doing? How could I have listened silently and comforted him when I knew that I had only added to his pain by coming to an understanding with Katrina? It would have been worse, I think, than to have just told him then. We were not formally betrothed by that point but we knew that we would be. It was a bad situation all around."

"Yeah, it was," Abbie conceded. "But to ask for his blessing? In the same conversation where he found out that Katrina had feelings for you at all? The very day after she left him?"

"I suppose it might have been a little overly optimistic," Ichabod said, "but I wanted to make it clear to him that we still cared about him and weren't doing it to hurt him. We weren't disregarding his feelings so we wanted his blessing. If we hadn't been attacked that day, he might have eventually given it."

Again, Abbie didn't say anything but Ichabod knew her too well it seemed.

"You doubt it?"

"I never met your friend but this is the man who decided to sell his soul to Moloch and help end the world as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse because a woman he didn't love was going to marry someone else," Abbie said flatly.

"I thought you did not approve of my conduct."

"I don't," Abbie said, "but he wins the Worst Friend Award here. He stopped in the middle of your really important Revolutionary War mission to challenge you to a duel. If he hadn't been so stupid and reckless he might not be dead. Couldn't it wait? He would have been well within his rights to never speak to you again or, I guess, challenge you to a duel on his own time but that was _really _not the time. I'm not even going to get into his acting like you stole Katrina as if she were a piece of property or something because, 18th century, I get it but that's not winning him any points either."

"It wasn't like that at all!" Ichabod objected. "He could not change what Katrina did and I couldn't help it either but I didn't have to reach an understanding with her once she broke her engagement to him and yet I did. I betrayed him."

And there it was again. Ichabod would freely admit that there were a lot of race and gender issues in his time and yet somehow every single person he knew would have been considered enlightened _today_. Somehow she doubted that a guy who would stop in the middle of his very important country-changing mission to duel someone over a broken engagement viewed women as independent and respected beings capable of making their own choices.

"You did," Abbie agreed, "but given that he quickly agreed to sell his soul and help end the world so he could get vengeance on you, he betrayed you worse."

"We don't know he immediately took the chance to serve Moloch!"

"How long do you think Moloch was going to waste on this guy trying to convince him?" Abbie asked practically. "And agreeing to end the world because he wasn't going to get to marry a woman that he wouldn't get to marry even if she hadn't broken the engagement since he was _dead _puts him up there as literally one of the worst people in existence."

"I hardly think-" Ichabod started to say.

"No, I'm serious. Think of all the truly bad people you've heard of and then ask yourself if they ever tried to literally destroy all life on this planet. And then ask yourself if you really think that the Horseman 'isn't so bad.'"

"You are misrepresenting what I said," Ichabod protested.

"Think about it and get back to me," Abbie told him. "And let's not forget the fact that Abraham apparently didn't even love Katrina and yet he _still _got her thrown into purgatory for two hundred years so she can be his 'prize' at the end of all of this. What exactly do you think that entails?"

Ichabod looked a little ill. "Nothing good."

"We'll save her, Crane," Abbie assured him, smiling softly at him.

Ichabod smiled back. "I know."

"It's just…If that's how your friendship ended…Abraham was far worse, of course, and completely overreacted to everything but you don't come out looking good either. You said you were best friends? I can see how your intentions were in the right place but nothing you've told me of him makes me think he was all that great," Abbie said honestly.

Ichabod looked down and sighed. "When I turned coat, not everyone was accepting of me and my intentions. There were plenty of Englishmen who fought alongside the Americans – not least because the difference between them was at the time a matter of which side you were on – but I had had a reasonably high position among the King's forces. And there was so much about my reason for changing allegiances that I could not explain. Abraham accepted me without question and his word meant much. I do not know where I would be without him. And he died. He died because we were not ready when we were ambushed after I told him something terribly shocking and hurtful. And when he was wounded I had to leave him to his fate to save my own life and fulfill our mission. I suppose, in the years, that followed I may not have…always remembered the negatives."

Abbie nodded. "Understandable. I don't think I've dwelt on one negative thing about Corbin since his death. I'm not even annoyed about his not telling me about any of this or about secretly keeping in contact with Jennie and I _know _that if he were still here I'd give him hell for that."

"And while his last day alive may not have been either of our finest hours and he has made some truly terrible choices since then, he wasn't all bad. There was plenty in him to like and to admire. And that scares me more than anything else," Ichabod said, troubled.

"I know what you mean," Abbie said quietly. "Andy Brooks was a good guy once, too. And he's still trying to help us. I mean, maybe it's just some leftover twisted feelings for me or something but I think he really is trying to do the right thing. He's just not so good at it even without having his will literally taken over."

Ichabod sighed. "This was so much simpler when it was just otherworldly entities."

"That it was," Abbie agreed. "We're going to finish this, Crane. It may take seven years if we're unlucky but we're going to see it through. And then there won't be any more Abraham Van Brunts or Andy Brookses or Katrinas."

"Oh, we will see it done, Leftenant. Of that, I have no doubt."

And just for that moment, despite all the questions and concerns still swirling around in her head, Abbie believed him.


End file.
